Reply #8: I am reading "Bomb Power" by Gary Wills this all builds from "national security" in the nuclear age

[underpants]

Garry Wills is also very upset about George - but Bush, now. A prolific author of astonishing range - from St. Augustine to Henry Adams to Richard Nixon - Wills in "Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State" offers a forceful indictment of the 43rd president, and even more of his vice president, Dick Cheney. Wills' outrage is broad: torture, abuse of secrecy, illegal covert operations, signing statements and (in Wills' estimation) unconstitutional expansion of the commander-in-chief power expressed in Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution. We have come a long way from the framers.

His second goal is to explain how we got here, as in the book's first sentence: "This book has a basic thesis, that the Bomb altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots." He explains in the next paragraph that today's abuses "grew out of the Manhattan Project, out of its product, and even more out of its process. The project's secret work, secretly funded at the behest of the President, was a model for the covert activities and overt authority of the government we now experience." For the first half of this impassioned book, Wills offers a condensed account of the development of the atomic bomb in World War II and the rise of the "national security state" under President Harry Truman. He proposes that the first led to the second.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-24/books/17835152_1_atomic-bomb-modern-presidency-manhattan-project

In his 28th book, "Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State," he amplifies an idea he first raised a decade ago in "A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government" -- that the dawn of the Atomic Age fundamentally changed our institutions of republican government.

"George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change . . . the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. . . . The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire National Security State, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the Cold War and the Cold War with the 'war on terror' -- all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order."

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/20/entertainment/la-et-rutten20-2010jan20